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Monday, August 14, 2017

I think I mentioned before that I'm studying The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne,
a really cool editing method that takes you deep into how a story's
theme and structure work together. The approach it takes really struck a
chord with me, so I gave it a try with Heir of Tanaris. This
might be more interesting for writers, but if you're an avid reader and
like seeing how the sausage is made, so to speak, you might find it
interesting too.

Heir had already been through one major revision and was out with the beta readers while I was working through the Story Grid book,
but I felt like I hadn't gone deep enough into what the story is about.
This is a novel that has given me a hard time for years, trying to
really get a grasp on it. So I decided to take Heir through the
process, which involves making a spreadsheet of different sets of info
about the story and a 1-page summary of the story then putting it all
together into a grid.

Here's a screen shot of part of my spreadsheet for Heir:

Because spreadsheets are awesome, and doing this helped me start to clearly see the patterns of the story.

My
"1 page" summary kinda turned out to be a lot more complicated than
that. The Story Grid summary is based on a 3-part structure, beginning -
middle - end, while I myself am more partial to a four-part structure,
beginning - middle 1 - [midpoint reversal] - middle 2 - end, and Heir
actually falls more naturally into 5 parts. But the basic principles
are the same, each section consists of complications rising to some sort
of crisis and climax, and I eventually got that beaten into shape.

And
then the fun part, making the actual grid. You do this on actual grid
paper with actual pens (it is possible to do it on a spreadsheet, but it
would be a lot harder unless you're a spreadsheet virtuoso, and the
examples I've seen are hard to read); I used my new set of Tul colored
gel pens :D which was fun. And here it is:

The
boxes above and below the center line each represent a scene. The Story
Grid method evaluates scenes based on how the story situation changes,
from bad to good (negative to positive) or good to bad (positive to
negative); you can also have bad to worse (which is fun) and good to
better (use sparingly). Scenes that move in a positive direction go
above the line, scenes that go in a negative direction go below the
line. The tricky thing, and the thing that really helps you strengthen
the theme of the story, is the direction the scene goes in has to relate
to the overall storyline. For example, if the villain gets something he
wants, that's positive for the villain but negative for the overall
story. So that scene goes below the line.

​Trickier is if one of
the good guys gets something he wants that he shouldn't want, because
he's trying to overcome a character flaw; that is also a negative turn
for the story, even though it's temporarily positive for the character.
Or if the character has to make a sacrifice in order to achieve their
goal; negative at the moment for the character, but positive for the
storyline. It can especially get complicated if you have two conflicting
goals. A scene can be positive for one storyline and negative for the
other. For example, in a romance, if the hero passionately kisses the
heroine even though he's got no business kissing her at all right now,
that's positive for the romance but negative for his moral development. Heir of Tanaris has a lot of that conflicting stuff going on, so this helped me get a firmer grip on all of it.

I
had fun with my colored pens :) The blue boxes are for scenes where
we're in Davian's head, pink boxes are for scenes in Isamina's point of
view. Imaginative, I know :P Brown boxes are for the villain. The
colored lines going up and down represent the rise and fall of the
different storylines. Blue is one of Davian's storylines, green is the
other, pink is Isamina's, and orange is the romance storyline. That
line, for example, goes down when something happens to keep Davian and
Isamina apart and up when they're together and their relationship
progresses.

Now, over on the right hand side, not all the way to
the right but kind of in the middle of the right side of the graph, you
might notice a problem. That's right, hardly any scenes with a negative
turn. Almost all the action is above the line. This means everything
through here was going very smoothly for our hero and heroine. Which is
nice for them but makes for a boring story. That was a huge flaw in the
story which was really made clear by the grid. So what I did was go back
and evaluate the story conflicts in each of those scenes, the
larger-scale problems the characters are facing throughout the book.
What problems did I solve too easily? Where do the characters need to
struggle harder?

Another problem is all the way to the right,
near the end, there's one scene that stretches both above and below the
center line with a bunch of lines zooming up and down and up and down
all within that one scene that takes place over maybe an hour of story
time. What that showed me is I was trying to do too much in that one
scene and the climax of the story was rushed. So there again I had to
deepen the struggle, and also spread it out over more scenes and over
time within the story.

I just finished the revision incorporating everything I got from this and also the beta reader feedback, and I think it's made Heir of Tanaris
a much stronger, deeper book. I'm going through a modified version of
the process with the first draft of the Defenders of the Wildings
series, combining it with Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel method,
in hopes of nailing all the major story issues in one big revision
instead of two. Which hopefully will help me get those books out faster.

To learn more about the Story Grid, visit the Story Grid website.
Most of the content from the book is also available for free on the
blog, and you can also view story grids that Shawn Coyne made for Silence of the Lambs (the book he uses as the example throughout the blog posts and book) and Pride and Prejudice.

Anyway, Heir of Tanaris
is currently on track for release in late September. To make sure you
don't miss out on the release (and the special limited-time low
introductory price), sign up for my email newsletter. Subscribers will also get the first peek at the cover, before I do the cover reveal here on my blog. So excited about this; Mominur Rahman's art for this book is gorgeous!

Monday, August 7, 2017

Aug. 7-13:Love Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, & Sci-fi Romance? Then check out this great sale,
hosted by the authors of the Dominon Rising boxed set, which releases
tomorrow. Even heroes and heroines need a little romance at the end of a
long day of saving their corner of the galaxy. You'll find 40+ books by
the Dominon Rising authors and guest authors (including me :D ) for
only 99c, for a limited time.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

August 5-6: The 99 cent Science Fiction and Fantasy Promomotions
hosted by Patty Jansen are back. You'll find around 100 books in a wide
variety of fantasy and science fiction genres, all 99 cents. This sale
includes all the major retailers, not just Amazon. (Selection varies by
store.) The Lost Book of Anggird
is in this sale; I rarely discount this book, so if you haven't read
this epic fantasy about a stuffy professor of magic, his free-spirited
assistant, and the most dangerous book of all, here's your chance to get
it for only 99 cents!

Aug. 2-16: The summer/winter book promotions continue with Geektastic Books' August Instafreebie giveaway!
A unique selection of 17 books, plus you'll find exclusive author
interviews and a giveaway to win a Fire tablet and Amazon gift card!
(Please note that some of the books may require you to sign up for the
author's email list in order to download them.)

Friday, August 4, 2017

You may or may not
notice a slight difference in the site banner and the cover gallery over
to the side - I've done a slight refresh of the cover of Beneath the Canyons, and also got a shiny new cover for the Daughter of the Wildings boxed set! Here it is in all its glory:

Same awesome art by Mominur Rahman,
but I adjusted the color and lighting a bit and changed the color on
the lettering to bring out that magical glow thing happening around the
edges of Silas and Lainie, coming off of the ore they're holding, and
also cropped in a little closer on the characters so that the magic is a
more prominent element.

Anyway, as for actual books, I'm still
chugging along. I've been slightly less exhausted this week than I was
last week, but my brain is very unfocused. I'm mainly concentrating my
efforts on the second big revision of Heir of Tanaris
right now; I want to get that done and edited and released. I'm going
to go out on a limb here and say end of September, but I can't make any
guarantees this far out.

Once Heir of Tanaris is out,
I'll turn my full focus (such as it is) to Defenders of the Wildings.
I've got another story/series idea I want to work on, that I think I can
set in the Islands of the Wildings world, but first I'll just work on
the big edit on Defenders. It's almost scary how much work it's going to
need, but I'm trying out a process that I hope will let me cut my two
major revisions down to one. I also have a bunch of short stories I've
been meaning to get to in the evenings on days when I get my full quota
of work done during the day, but that never happens. At least I'm making
progress, slow though it may be.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Whew, ok. Yes, I'm still here, up over my head in revisions on two large projects, Heir of Tanaris (the upcoming Tehovir novel) and Defenders of the Wildings, the follow-up series to Daughter of the Wildings. I'm making progress; Tanaris
went out to the beta readers early in the month and the reports are
coming back in, and I finished making my revision notes for Defenders (a
couple hundred pages' worth) and now I'm trying to systematically set
about making sense of it all and organizing the revision so I don't miss
anything, from adding the actual plot to book 1 to characters whose
reason for being in the books I'm still figuring out to what exactly
that green stuff is.

I've also got some more short stories I want to put into a collection, and then there's the Source-Breaker stories, which will be a newsletter
exclusive. Life's been kind of crazy for the last month, with one thing
and another, but hopefully things will settle down. I'm hoping to be
able to cut back on extra demands so I can recover from everything and
get caught up on my writing projects.

Since I'm always trying to improve my writing craft, besides my usual revision methods I'm working my way through The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne,
which is basically like a big textbook about story structure and story
theme and how they work together, and how to analyze them in your
project. I'm doing this with the revised version of Tanaris,
and it's making me look at things in a different way that's both
mind-blowing and makes a lot of sense with how I think about writing.
I'll definitely be incorporating it into my workflow. It might even
streamline my process a little by catching more of the big issues at the
beginning of revisions.

With Heir of Tanaris coming into the later stages of revision, I think I'll do the cover reveal coming up before too long. Newsletter subscribers will get the first peek, so if you're anxious to see this gorgeous artwork, sign up if you haven't already! And Sivael from Source-Breaker has been waiting to be interviewed, so I'll try to get to that next. Back to work :)

Saturday, April 1, 2017

April 1-2: It's the Science Fiction and Fantasy 99 cent sale!
Load up your ereader with science fiction, dystopian, horror, epic
fantasy, urban fantasy, science fiction and fantasy romance, and even
some box sets, all for 99 cents! Chosen of Azara is in this sale, 99 cents at all retailers.

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About Me

Kyra Halland has always loved fantasy. She has also always loved a good love story. Years ago, as a new stay-at-home mom, she decided to combine those two loves - like chocolate and peanut butter! - by writing the kinds of romantic fantasy novels she wanted to read.
Complicated, honorable heroes; strong, smart, feminine heroines; magic, romance, and adventure; deep emotion mixed with a dash of offbeat humor - all of these make up Kyra Halland's worlds. She loves sharing those worlds with readers and hopes they will enjoy her stories and characters as much as she does.
Kyra Halland lives in southern Arizona. She has a very patient husband, two less-patient cats, two young adult sons, a lovely daughter-in-law, and an adorable granddaughter. Besides writing, she enjoys scrapbooking and anime, and she wants to be a crazy cat lady when she grows up.